In a coffee shop, waiting for their beverages after they’d already paid for them and had stepped aside so that other customers could order, two women who’d entered the establishment together, and who were dressed as though they’d recently been exercising, stood together and spoke in confidential...

On a sidewalk in the city, out front of a building that had revolving doors through which people were emerging and disappearing, two men who seemed to be employed there, but who now were taking a cigarette break, were conversing about something they both seemed to agree was cause for...

As I walked past the grocery store, on my way to one place or another, I saw, tied by a leash to a bicycle rack that no one happened to be using, a dog that was watching so intently for its master that it didn’t even glance at the middle-aged man who came out through the automatic doors, carrying his purchases in two plastic...

Even though the street was empty, and no cars were approaching the intersection from either direction, the woman who was waiting with her child on the corner did not begin to cross the road until the lights had changed and the walk signal had been...

Out front of a brownstone, on a sidewalk in a neighborhood in Brooklyn where people lived, as opposed to worked (or as opposed to lived and worked both), I passed a girl who wasn’t waving goodbye to the person that her mother was waving goodbye...

When I boarded the bus, I sat across the aisle from a young man who seemed to know the bus driver and who in fact was carrying on, with the driver, a conversation that did not cease from the time I got on to the time I disembarked, some fifteen minutes...

During the morning rush, on a train into Manhattan, a girl whose face seemed to have been injured long enough ago that the wounds had healed and were no longer causing her physical pain (though possibly they were still causing her psychological or emotional pain) stood in front of me, grasping the pole that I too was grasping in order to maintain balance as the carriage swayed in the...

In the city, in the afternoon, because I had nothing to do, or because I wanted to relieve myself of the feeling that I had nothing to do, I followed a man who was walking with what appeared to be a purposeful gait, for several blocks, until he entered the lobby of a building whose marble floor he crossed in order to arrive at a bank of elevators in front of which other people were already...

At the bar, on the other side of a man who’d started talking to me about the regrets he’d had in life, as well as the things in his life that he didn’t regret (but that he’d been happy or grateful for) a man was watching a sporting event that was being broadcast on a television set that was located on a wall at a height that allowed everyone to see...

I was waiting for a walk signal at an intersection in Midtown when a man asked another man which direction one should walk in order to arrive at a museum that was not too far from the part of the city in which he already happened to be. After the first man had started to walk away, the woman who was with the other man (the man who’d given directions) said, “Are you sure it’s down that street? I thought it was down the other one.” To which the man who’d given directions, after considering a moment, and looking to...

Through the window of a café in which I was sitting, drinking coffee, I watched, but could not overhear, the conversation of a couple who’d stopped on the sidewalk so that the dog that was with them (and whose leash the woman was holding) could greet, and linger with, a dog that was being walked by a person who was also...

In the train on the way home from the beach, where I’d walked for a while along the boardwalk without speaking to anyone, though I’d seen a lot of people and had heard a lot of people’s voices and laughter, and would’ve spoken to a person had the opportunity or necessity arisen, I stood in a carriage that was crowded at first but that slowly became less crowded and that, by the time we reached the station in which was the neighborhood from which I’d departed, was so empty that only myself and two other people (who happened to...